An adventurous -- and successful -- gambit in support of Irish nationalism

March 17, 2002|By Maurice Walsh. Maurice Walsh, a BBC foreign correspondent, is writing a book on foreign correspondents and the Irish war of independence.

The Voyage of the Catalpa:

A Perilous Journey and Six Irish Rebels' Flight to Freedom

By Peter F. Stevens

Carroll & Graf, 391 pages, $26

The Fenian rebellion in Ireland in 1867 was a failure, but it served as the perfect template for the much more celebrated rising of 1916, when military defeat proved to be a mere prelude to Irish independence.

Launched on a snowy night in March, the Fenian insurrection amounted to groups of poorly armed men turning out in a handful of locations, already fatally compromised because their plans were well known to the police and troops. Militarily, the rebellion was so unsuccessful that most historical accounts mention no casualties from the handful of sporadic engagements. But in a way that was to be replicated in 1916 (with far greater potency), defeat became a different kind of victory. The majority of the Irish public couldn't care less about the plotters, but the harsh treatment meted out to the Fenian prisoners evoked a sympathy that stretched well beyond radical nationalists. A well known conservative and Protestant lawyer, Isaac Butt, relaunched his legal career defending the Fenians in court and led the campaign for an amnesty for the political prisoners.

Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin coined the term "propaganda of the deed," and the Fenians were very much in the mold of continental revolutionaries of the 19th Century: secretive, prone to doctrinal and personality rows (the rebellion was originally due to go ahead in 1865 but was postponed because of a split in America), and led by lower-middle-class journalists, scholars and polemicists who were all romantics. But the Fenians had an international dimension that previous conspirators lacked. The swelling Irish population on the U.S. East Coast was a source of support, money and leadership. This new departure was noticed at the time: The Times of London described Fenianism as "an exotic growth, an importation from America, entirely out of harmony with real Irish sentiment." Other British commentators blamed Americans for teaching the Irish lower orders how to use revolvers.

It didn't matter that a mixture of ineptitude and bad luck prevented those who had the revolvers from using them. The rebellion of 1867 may have postponed for a long time another full-tilt assault on British rule in Ireland, but it taught the Fenians the value of sensational gestures. Peter Stevens' book "The Voyage of the Catalpa" is a straightforward account of the most adventurous gestures devised to keep Fenianism on the political map in the wake of the failed rebellion: the escape in 1876 of six Fenian prisoners who had been convicted in 1866 of treason against the crown and whose notoriety had prompted the British government to ship them to the Fremantle jail in western Australia, "the most godforsaken, escape-proof prison in the Empire."

The escape was plotted by John Devoy, the Fenians' chief propagandist and himself a beneficiary of the amnesty campaign. Set free from an English jail, Devoy went to New York to begin a long career as a journalist. After one Fenian prisoner escaped from Fremantle aboard an American whaling ship, Devoy devised a plan to rescue the six left behind by buying his own ship and sending it halfway around the world on a secret mission.

The best part of Stevens' book is his account of the voyage itself. Recruited by Devoy for his seamanship, the captain of the Catalpa, George Anthony, sailed for several months from New Bedford, Mass., to western Australia keeping the true purpose of the voyage from his crew, who believed they were on their way to a routine whaling expedition. It is essentially a seafaring adventure, an Irish nationalist version of "Treasure Island," with the looming threats of storms, mutiny and interception of her majesty's navy on the high seas.

On shore, the drama is provided by the secret agents sent from America to have the prisoners sprung just as the Catalpa arrived. The most extraordinary character is John Breslin, by all accounts a matinee idol, who posed as a wealthy American financier, inveigling his way into parties at the governor's mansion while at the same time whispering instructions to the prisoners while they worked on road gangs.

The story builds to a climax as the Catalpa reaches Australia. Against the odds, Capt. Anthony and his men rendezvous with the prisoners on a beach near Fremantle, but even then escape is not guaranteed, and there are several close shaves before the prisoners are on their way to America.